Bill Gates-backed ESS — which makes giant batteries out of iron, salt and water — starts trading

Published

4 years ago

October 11, 2021

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An ESS Inc battery.

Photo courtesy ESS Inc

ESS is trying to solve a critical problem with renewable energy: How to store energy from wind and solar installations when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

The company’s proposed solution is a long-duration energy storage batteries made of iron, salt and water, which are much cheaper and more readily available than the elements used in batteries today, like lithium and cobalt. Its early momentum attracted $57 million in investments from powerful backers like Bill Gates and Softbank, CEO Eric Dresselhuys told CNBC.

On Monday, it hits another milestone, going public via SPAC to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday under the ticker symbol GWH. It hopes to raise $308 million through the deal.

“There have been very few solutions for this long duration up until now, and it’s largely driven from the fact that we didn’t rely on energy storage as a major solution for hardening the system,” said Dresselhuys, who became the CEO of ESS this year after decades of energy and technology executive experience.

The company launched in the garage of co-founders Craig Evans and Julia Song in Portland, Ore., in 2011 (they’re a married couple, in addition to being business partners), then moved to the Portland State Business Accelerator before expanding to its current 200,000-square-foot headquarters.

The company is backed by Bill Gates’ clean energy investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, SB Energy (a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank) and multinational chemical company BASF, among other investors. The SPAC comes through a reverse merger with ACON S2 Acquisition Corp., run out of private equity firm Acon Investments.

ESS has not recorded any revenue yet, according to financial filings dated Sept. 8, but Dresselhuys says it has shipped product to customers, including TerraSol Energies in Pennsylvania and Siemens-Gamesa in Denmark; investor documents claim several other unnamed utilities as customers also. Also, ESS has orders in the pipeline from SB Energy and Enel Green Power España.

The company lost $245.3 million in the first six months of 2021, but only $18.4 million were operating losses (the remainder was due to losses on reevaluations of warrant and derivative liabilities). Operating losses were $17.4 million for 2021, and it expects to record its first profit in 2023.

Iron, salt and water: Safe, readily available materials

The big breakthrough for ESS is a long-duration battery built from readily available materials, explained Carmichael Roberts, a co-chair of the investment committee at Breakthrough Energy Ventures In a battery, the electrolyte is the liquid medium that connects the two ends of a battery, the anode and the cathode.

“The flow battery is cheaper, safer and has better operational life than conventional lithium-ion storage,” Roberts said.

Making a battery out of iron, salt and water means “there’s no toxicity, the technology we build doesn’t start fires or doesn’t blow up in fire,” said Dresselhuys.

Also, ESS batteries do not have lithium or cobalt, two common elements in batteries that are being impacted by supply chain crunches.

“Both are in potentially short supply globally and none are produced in the U.S.,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University who specializes in the energy grid.

“Lithium is less of an issue in the long run, as long as we recycle lithium ion batteries, but there may be some short-run price increases as production ramps up to match battery demand for EVs,” Jenkins said.

“Cobalt is a bit trickier and has come under fire for some of the supply chain relying on quote unquote ‘artisanal mines’ in Africa, which employ forced labor, and child labor in some cases, with people digging out cobalt by hand and very, very harsh conditions,” Jenkins said.

Neither does ESS use vanadium, a chemical element used in some flow battery technology. While promising, Dresselhuys says it’s too expensive to be meaningful.

“It’s one thing to make something work, and that can be very difficult. But it has to work cost effectively to be viable as a system because of the scale we’re talking about,” he said.

How the battery works: ‘The elegance is the simplicity’

Visualize a sandwich, said ESS’s business development lead, Hugh McDermott. The ESS battery technology is a stack of carbon plates with salt water with iron flowing through each layer.

Iron comes out of the salt water solution and sticks to one side of the plates. When the polarity of the plates is changed, the iron dissolves back into the water solution.

From a battery management control system, the flow of the ions can be switched, thereby also switching the flow of electricity onto and off the grid.

ESS Inc’s iron flow battery “stack.”

Image courtesy ESS Inc.

The idea of a iron flow battery has been around since the 1970s, Dresselhuys said. But there were technical issues that scientists hadn’t solved.

For example, early iterations of the iron flow battery technology would work for a while, but the electrolyte fluid would become imbalanced, build up on the battery, and the battery would become ineffective over time. To fix this, ESS developed a proton pump, which Dresselhuys says “allows the system to keep itself in balance throughout all of those charges and discharges so that the electrolyte is entirely clean.”

Early research was funded in part by almost $3 million dollars in grant funding from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, as well as individuals and local investment funds.

“The elegance is the simplicity,” said Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO at SB Energy and a board member at ESS. (SB Energy is not only an investor, but also a customer.)

But it took a lot of research and development to get a simple solution to work. ESS has been working on research and development for a decade. The proton pump was a really key breakthrough for the company, but one of many.

“There’s a very large intellectual property moat around the core technology and that will make it very difficult for other competitors to build a battery that is similar to ESS’ battery,” Hossfeld told CNBC.

An ESS Inc battery

Photo courtesy ESS Inc

Another long duration battery being developed by Form Energy also uses iron and also is backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Form, however, is developing iron-air batteries, which uses different technology and aims to provide energy storage for multiple days.

ESS batteries can store energy for 4 to 12 hours, whereas the lithium batteries in cars are typically capped between two and four hours, Dresselhuys said.

To go above four hours of energy storage with lithium-ion batteries requires increasing the number of lithium-ion cells, Hossfeld told CNBC. ESS, on the other hand, can just add more water, iron and salt to a bigger tank of its stack-sandwiches.

“The way to think about ESS cost-wise is they are cost parity with lithium ion at four hours, and about half the cost above that, which we think creates a big advantage for them,” Hossfeld told CNBC.

Another key to the ESS iron-flow technology is its resilience.

“Capacity stays the same between year one and year 20,” Hossfeld said. Anyone who has a cellphone knows that is not the case for lithium-ion batteries. “You open it up, it comes out of the case, right now it will give you 10 hours. We all know it doesn’t give you 10 hours in a year, right?”

Energy centers are co-located with a wind or solar farm, allowing the batteries to charge up during the day when the sun is shining and then discharge in the late afternoon when there is typically a bump in energy demand.

SB Energy’s first installation of ESS Inc batteries in Davis, Calif. SB Energy is an investor in ESS and also a customer. These are batteries SB Energy purchased.

Photo courtesy SB Energy

Similarly with wind. “You can store four, eight, 10 hours of wind plants in the middle of the night and then discharge it during the day as needed,” Hossfeld told CNBC. “We look at ESS as a really good complement to that daily cycling between wind and solar.”

The Energy Warehouse, the only ESS product that exists so far, is the size of a shipping container, 40 feet long and 8 feet wide.

“That container holds 500 kilowatt hours of energy. That’s roughly the energy that you would need to power 20 to 30 homes, depending on where you are in the country,” McDermott told CNBC.

Four ESS Inc batteries

photo courtesy ESS Inc

ESS is also building a product called Energy Centers intended for utilities and independent power producers — for instance, businesses that own large solar farms who then sell that power to the grid.

For these kinds of larger customers, ESS will use similar battery technology, but the battery modules will be contained together in a building. Customer trials are expected to begin in 2022.

The big challenge: Getting an iron flow battery to scale

While iron-based batteries are a well-known technology, the big challenge has been getting them to scale.

“Iron based chemistries for flow batteries have a long and storied history, rightfully so because in theory they have some of the lowest theoretical costs possible. On paper these systems scale quite well,” explained Dan Steingart, Associate Professor of Chemical Metallurgy at Columbia University

But the reality has been quite different.

“We have not seen widespread adoption of this class of batteries and its cousins because of last-mile engineering challenges that have in the past added unacceptable capital and operating costs when compared to other available technologies,” Steingart told CNBC.

Flow batteries depend on pumps and membranes that are highly technical. “Think a kidney, writ very large, working 10,000 times harder than it has to, all the time,” he said. “It has been very difficult to have these, in practice, operate in a reliable manner without significant ancillary systems (that make the system more expensive upfront) or maintenance calls (which increase running costs).”‘

That said, Steingart notes the “sufficient capital” ESS has raised to validate its solutions to these challenges.

Also, ESS in September secured a 10-year battery warranty backed by the insurance giant Munich Re, which “is a strong signal of a positive outcome,” Steingart told CNBC.

Cost is another conern.

“The iron flow battery technology looks very promising as it is safe, environmentally friendly, uses non-toxic materials that can be sourced in the US, and doesn’t degrade over time and over multiple cycles,” Jan Pepper, the CEO of Peninsula Clean Energy, told CNBC.

Peninsula Clean Energy, a community energy buyer and the official power provider for San Mateo County in Calif., has not worked with ESS directly, but it’s trying to deliver cost-competitive 100% renewable energy on a 24/7 basis by 2025. Pepper knows that energy storage will help meet those goals.

“The current challenge with iron flow batteries is the cost,” Pepper said. “If companies like ESS can bring the cost down for their technology, then they and others will be able to make a meaningful impact in decarbonization efforts and help organizations like Peninsula Clean Energy meet our ambitious goals.”

As Steingart told CNBC, “A goal I use is in my lab for long duration energy storage: The battery has to cost about the same price as dog food per pound and last forever with little intervention.”

That said, if ESS can do what its investors think it can, “the successful execution of this chemistry would be a significant milestone for grid scale energy storage,” Steingart told CNBC.

Environment

Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump

Published

8 hours ago

April 25, 2025

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Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump

Global renewable developer and energy giant RWE has halted its US offshore wind operations “for the time being” because of the “political environment” the Trump administration has created.

RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer, said in March that it had dialed back its US offshore wind activities. But now, CEO Marcus Krebber said in a speech transcript, which he’ll deliver at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Essen on April 30, that its US offshore wind business is now closed (but it wasn’t all bad news):

In the US, where we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being, our business in onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically. At the start of this year, we reached an important milestone when our US generation capacity hit the 10 gigawatt mark. The construction of a further 4 gigawatts is secured.

He went on to say that renewables have created regional value and jobs, but that the company remains “cautious given the political developments.” RWE has introduced more stringent requirements for future US investments:

All necessary federal permits must be in place. Tax credits must be safe harbored and all relevant tariff risks mitigated. In addition, onshore wind and solar projects must have secured offtake at the time of the investment decision. Only if these conditions are met will further investments be possible, given the political environment.

About half of RWE’s installed renewable capacity is in the US, where it’s the third-largest renewable energy company through its subsidiary, RWE Clean Energy. RWE holds the rights to develop US offshore wind projects in New York, Louisiana, and California.

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RWE paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease area in 2022, where it’s meant to develop the 3 gigawatt (GW) Community Offshore Wind with the UK’s National Grid. Community Offshore Wind was projected to come online in the early 2030s and expected to power more than a million homes.

The developer paid $5.6 billion for the Louisiana lease in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023 as the lone bidder for development rights, and the Canopy Offshore Wind project off Northern California was not expected to be completed for another decade.

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Environment

Trump’s memecoin dinner contest earns insiders $900,000 in two days

Published

9 hours ago

April 25, 2025

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Trump's memecoin dinner contest earns insiders 0,000 in two days

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his allies have raked in nearly $900,000 in trading fees over the past two days from the president’s $TRUMP cryptocurrency token, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain data company.

The surge came after a Wednesday announcement in which the top 220 holders of the token were promised dinner with the president.

“Have Dinner in Washington, D.C. With President Trump,” reads a message on the front page of the Trump coin’s website. The event, which is black tie optional and hosted at the president’s private club in the Washington area, is scheduled for May 22, with a reception for the top 25 holders. A “VIP White House Tour” will take place the following day, the site says. The website also hosts an active leaderboard displaying the usernames of top buyers.

The $TRUMP memecoin jumped more than 50% on the dinner news, boosting its total market value to $2.7 billion. It was met with fierce criticism from some of Trump’s political opponents who said the move was further evidence that the president was using crypto to enrich himself. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a prominent Trump critic, wrote on X that the sale was “the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Roughly 80% of the $TRUMP token supply is controlled by the Trump Organization and affiliates, according to the project’s website. Since its launch in January, trading activity has generated about $324.5 million in trading fees for insiders, Chainalysis found. These fees are generated through the token’s built-in mechanism that routes a percentage of each trade to wallets controlled by the project — wallets that, according to the website, are linked to the coin’s creators.

Memecoins, often referred to as meme tokens, are a subset of digital assets that use blockchain technology and derive their value largely from internet culture, memes and social media hype rather than from an underlying utility or asset. The originators of memecoins can make fees when their coins are bought and sold.

They have grown in popularity in recent years as speculative assets, with some coins including dogecoin and fartcoin amassing total market values in excess of $1 billion.

Most of the $TRUMP supply remains locked under a three-year vesting plan, with coins gradually becoming available over time. Lockups like these are meant to protect investors by preventing insiders from cashing out all at once — a scheme commonly known in the crypto world as a “rug pull.” Vesting schedules aim to give retail buyers confidence that early holders won’t overwhelm the market and tank the token’s value.

Still, the dinner contest is being viewed by critics as an unusually explicit attempt to monetize presidential access.

As CNBC reported Friday, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are urging the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether the promotion constitutes “pay to play” corruption.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The company behind the memecoin also did not respond to a request for comment.

Delaney Marsco, the director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance and government accountability, told NBC News the coin and dinner contest amounted to an unprecedented ethics breach — though it is unlikely to be illegal.

“Criminal conflicts of interest statutes don’t apply to the President,” she said. “That has allowed him to go against decades of of norms that every modern president since Carter has adhered to, which is to divest your financial interests, rid yourself of your businesses, and kind of go in to the presidency with a clean financial slate so that no one could accuse you of manipulating policy decisions or using your position in order to enrich yourself.”

“The fact that he is not barred by the law from having these financial interests like this meme coin allows him to engage in a lot of seemingly corrupt activity. It has the appearance of a pay to play, so the President is apparently selling access to himself,” Marsco added.

Molly White, an independent crypto researcher, told NBC News that the leaderboard only shows top $TRUMP holders — and then only by their chosen screen name, making it difficult to identify who is paying to potentially join the dinner.

Schiff and Warren have cited public reports showing that some $TRUMP investors have ties to foreign exchanges or received funds from crypto platforms banned in the U.S., including Binance.

White also noted that at least one top $TRUMP owner has an account on Binance, a cryptocurrency company that doesn’t allow American users.

Trump was elected with significant help from the cryptocurrency industry, which poured tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election, outpacing corporate donations from traditional sectors like banking and oil. After opposing digital assets during his first term, Trump pivoted in 2024 to campaign as a champion of cryptocurrency, casting Democrats as hostile to innovation and as advocating for tighter regulation.

The $TRUMP token itself offers no product or service, according to the project’s website. It is part of a broader push by the Trump family into digital assets, despite the market’s volatility and regulatory risks.

In addition to the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, the family is backing World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance venture that has raised $550 million across two token sales since last October. Buyers are barred from reselling their tokens and receive no share of profits — but a Trump-affiliated entity is entitled to 75% of net revenue, including token sale proceeds.

Together, these projects have created new streams of revenue for Trump and his inner circle at a time when regulatory oversight of cryptocurrency has weakened sharply under his administration.

Environment

Drive Electric Earth Month, continues this weekend, get your EV Qs answered

Published

10 hours ago

April 25, 2025

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Drive Electric Earth Month, continues this weekend, get your EV Qs answered

It’s that time of year again, time for events across the country to show off electric vehicles at Drive Electric Earth Month.

Drive Electric Earth Month is an offshoot of Drive Electric Week, a long-running annual tradition hosting meetups mostly in the US, but also occasionally in other countries. It started as Drive Electric Earth Day, but since not every event can happen on the same day, they went ahead and extended it to encompass “Earth Month” events that happen across the month of April. It’s all organized by Plug In America, the Sierra Club, the Electric Vehicle Association, EV Hybrid Noire, and Drive Electric USA.

Events consist of general Earth Day-style community celebrations, EV Ride & Drives where you can test drive several EVs in one place, and opportunities to talk to EV owners and ask them questions about what it’s like to live with an EV, away from the pressure of a dealership.

This month, there are 158 events registered across the US and 1 in Mexico (including one online webinar about things to consider when purchasing an EV).

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Events have been happening all month, but the biggest weekend is this upcoming one, APril 26-27.

One really neat event was the Asheville event, which showcased the resiliency of EVs in an area devastated by Hurricane Helene, which was made more severe by climate change. That event was attended by the Rivian R1T which famously got dragged 100 feet submerged in mud and came out running fine.

But the bulk of the events happened on the weekends surrounding Earth Day, April 22, so there were several last weekend and will be even more this upcoming weekend.

There are plenty of events in the big cities where you’d expect, but Plug In America wanted to highlight a few of the events in smaller places around the country. Here’s a sampling of upcoming events:

Big Island EV – Cruise and Picnic in Waimea, HI on April 26, 10am-1pm – EV drivers will congregate in various places around the Big Island (Kona, Waimea, Waikoloa and Hilo), then drive up Saddle Road to the Gil Kahele Recreation Area on Mauna Kea for a potluck and a chance to talk about the experience of owning EVs on the Big Island.
Santa Barbara Earth Day 2025 and Green Car Show in Santa Barbara, CA on April 26-27, 11am-8pm – This is part of Santa Barbara’s Earth Day celebration, which routinely attracts 30,000 participants and is one of the longest-running Earth Day celebrations on the planet. The Green Car Show includes ride & drives and an “Owners Corner” where owners can showcase their EVs and attendees can check them out and ask questions.
Earth Day’25 – EV’s role in a sustainable future in Queretaro City, Mexico on April 26, 9am-4pm – The sole Mexican event, this is a combined in-person/online seminar at the Querétaro Institute of Technology.
Norman Earth Day Festival in Norman, OK on April 27, 12-5pm – Another municipal Earth Day festival, with hands-on activities for kids to learn about the environment. A portion of the parking lot reserved for an EV car show for EV owners who pre-register to show off their vehicles.
Oregon Electric Vehicle Association Test Drive & Information Expo in Portland, OR on April 27, 10am-4pm – This one is at Daimler Truck’s North American HQ, and will have several EVs for test drives, owner displays (including DIY gas-to-EV conversions), and keynote presentations by EV experts. They’ll even have a 1914 Detroit Electric EV available for test rides!
And, we at Electrek want to give a shoutout to Rove’s EV Drive Days in Santa Ana 10am-3pm April 28 – ROVE is the company behind the “full-service” EV charging concept that we’ve talked about several times here on Electrek, and we like what they’re doing for EV charging. They’ve hosted a few community events, and this is their contribution to Earth Month.

Each event has a different assortment of activities (e.g. test drives won’t be available at every event, generally just the larger ones attended by local dealerships), so be sure to check the events page to see what the plan is for your local event.

These events have offered a great way to connect with owners and see the newest electric vehicle tech, and even get a chance to do test rides and drives in person. Attendees got to hear unfiltered information from actual owners about the benefits and trials of owning EVs, allowing for longer and more genuine (and often more knowledgeable) conversations than one might normally encounter at a dealership.

And if you’re an owner – you can show off your car and answer those questions for interested onlookers.

To view all the events and see what’s happening in your area, you can check out the list of events or the events map. You can also sign up to volunteer at your local events, and if you plan to show off your electric car, you can RSVP on each event page and list the vehicle that you plan to show (or see what other vehicles have already registered).

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